Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum

The list of obnoxious fashion designers with ego-maniacal tendencies is, as you may guess, extremely long and also features Italian Valentino Garavani. Yet it looks like he's been trying to amend his reputation by opening a digital fashion museum.

The Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum launches today and the best thing about it is that it promises to be an archive featuring over 5,000 documents, so a very important resource not only for fashion fans, but also for fashion students and researchers.

Valentino made the right choice: there have been quite a few designers in Italy suggesting the government to open a fashion museum in Rome, but their requests were never heard. By opening his own virtual space, Valentino avoided issues of time and money, while giving the chance to people all over the world to access his work.

Born in Voghera in 1932 and named by his mother after her screen idol Rudolph Valentino, the designer left his hometown at seventeen, heading to Paris and enrolling in a course at the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture.

In 1951 he started working as assistant for Jean Dessés, moving, after five years, with Guy Laroche.

In January 1959 he went back to Italy, opened in Rome his own fashion house in Via Condotti and then moved to Via Gregoriana in 1967, presenting in the same year his first collection – featuring 24 all white designs dedicated to Jacqueline Kennedy – in the Sala Bianca at Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

From then on he went from strength to strength, winning the Neiman Marcus award in 1969 and creating collections characterised by a chic elegance for modern and refined femmes fatales.

At the end of the '60s Valentino launched his ready-to-wear line, Miss V, followed by the Valentino menswear line in 1972 (by the way, Valentino will also be the special guest at Pitti Uomo in January 2012), by a collection of homewares including wallpapers, tiles and furniture in 1973, and by make up in 1978.

In 1984 he also designed the uniforms for the Italian athletes at the Los Angeles Olympic Games.

The designer's work appeared in different exhibitions and retrospectives all over the world, his haute couture creations were featured in legendary films and he was the only designer who accepted to appear as himself in David Frankel’s The Devil Wears Prada.

In 2008 special correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine Matt Tyrnauer dedicated him a docu-film, Valentino: The Last Emperor. Valentino's house is currently led by creative directors Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli.

The virtual museum will hopefull allow visitors to explore different landmarks in Valentino's career, for example the introduction of the trademark “V” logo as a decorative motif (1967); the use of geometrical and Optical elements on a black background (1969); rich fabrics in nuances inspired by Matisse (1972) and Gustav Klimt (1973); his ample skirts in sherbet or white shades with large appliqued flowers (1976); the reintroduction of crinolines for the evening and of sober Tyrolean loden for his day wear (1977), his evening gowns in bright “Valentino red" and the vintage black-and-white gown from a 1992 collection that Julia Roberts donned when she was awarded the best actress Academy Award for Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich.

While the self-celebratory Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum perfectly fits in with the designer's ego-maniacal vision, hopefully it will become a useful tool for many of us ordinary mortals and its YouTube channel will feature further insights and interviews with the designer and his collaborators.

A few years ago in an interview with Italian tailor Bruno Piattelli, the designer stated that until there are women who choose to wear Valentino's creations and who feel glamorously beautiful in them, that special and magic relationship between women and Valentino will be alive, and his style will keep on evolving, incarnating women’s dreams and desires. Maybe after visiting the museum this will sound to us like a genuine prophecy rather than just a simple statement.

The museum launches today with a live press conference from New York (11.00 am local time or 5.00pm CET) featuring Valentino, Giancarlo Giammetti, Anne Hathaway, Amit Sood (creator of the Google Art Project) and assorted obnoxious characters such as Franca Sozzani, editor in chief of Italian Vogue. You can follow the conference live on the museum YouTube Channel or here.

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